Daylight is the best disinfectant - Why Meta removing fact checkers is necessary

A lot of people have been up in arms about Meta removing fact checking, believing it's falling in line with some sort of government administration. Although I think some of that is true, they likely had plans to remove fact checkers for a very long time - and they should. I say this as a notorious Zuckerberg hater.

People have concerns about social media not having fact checkers or teams of moderators to protect certain groups online and combat the spread of perceived misinformation. The reality is that it never actually helped any more than the block button. The only thing you could really speak to is a protection of children, which should be legally enforced and within parental responsibility.

Running people off a platform is how insane behavior festers and no one knows about it. You need to know who the crazy people are and if you can't keep tabs on them, you don't know the next move. You will not be able to bully whack-job ideology out of someone. You also won't get rid of it by dismantling their platform.

Pro-soviets exist despite soviet union falling. Nazis exist despite SS falling. Confederate supporters exist despite the confederates losing the war. The ideology is passed down and needs to be drowned out with different narratives and view points. You cannot do that, if you run them off of a platform. You would run them right into an echo chamber.

If you don't know who the enemy is, you will be blindsided. You may be thinking "well allowing them to be in public will spread their rhetoric", the bigger fish to fry is why someone would believe them. If someone sees this type of nonsense and accepts it as their reality, we have an issue with lack of media literacy and critical thinking.

I know it may seem like a risk of normalization, but you don't eradicate these types if you don't know who they are. You need to be able to see nonsense and determine that it's nonsense. Media literacy is a muscle you have to continuously work.

There is another discussion to be had of whether a private social media or entity in general, should be pressured by a government in any way. Even if you believe their pressure is for the greater good (not really, if they pick and choose what's right). It would make more sense to form federal laws or fines involving that, versus legally blurry pressure by government entities.

The power remains with the people on whether they will use that platform. Many people, organizations, and companies have moved away from X due to their approach to social media. Those people have the right to leave, just as X has the right to do whatever they choose with their site.

I don't like Musk and I never have, so I don't use X. End of story. What i'm not going to do is complain that he is not running the social media how I deem appropriate. He's a private owner to a privately owned company that I do NOT have to do anything with. He does not provide some essential service that is required to survive.

A few years ago an eating disorder subreddit got terminated by reddit and it was a huge ordeal. Some people felt the subreddit encouraged the behaviors, others felt it was a lifeline to discuss with people who understood. It was an outlet for people with uncomfortable questions and no one to talk to. Over time, people got better and left the subreddit and disorder behind completely.

Banning the subreddit was not the right move. It removed an essential place for a bunch of people who needed help being freed from some sort of illness and ideology attached to it.

It would be very similar to banning books that you don't agree with, even if they have what we deem to be "harmful rhetoric". You could require the authors (and social media sites) to put content warnings, but it's hard to say that they should be heavily moderated, redacted, or outright banned.

Ezra Klein recently had a guy on his youtube channel who believed in nonsense and Klein would listen and cordially offer different opinions. Some people in the comments felt irritated and said Klein shouldn't platform opposing views like this - and they're wrong. Klein needs to bring those ideas and thoughts into the light so society can work to dismantle the bad ones. Letting nonsense and warped ideology fester under the guise of political correctness will be punched down by an accelerating pendulum in the other way.

Being overly alarmist will diminish when the alarms actually need to be rung - it's one of the reasons why fascism and anti-intellectualism can smack people in the face (like right now) and they don't realize it. If everything and everyone is a problem, then nothing and no one is a problem.